C7 The Last Call

Doyle called at 6:11 in the morning. He had been up all night; she could hear it in the way he said her name.

"They found him," he said. "Hale."

"Where."

"Container yard off Bay Twelve. Empty reefer box." He paused. "Nine days, they think."

She was already standing. "Who has the scene."

"Fourth Precinct. Nobody's touched the box yet, they're waiting on the techs." Another pause, the kind he used when he was deciding how much of his job he was allowed to keep. "There's a phone."

"Don't let anyone log it."

"Ms. Vance—"

"I'll be there in forty minutes. Don't let anyone log it."

---

She spent twenty of those forty minutes at her own desk instead of in the car, because there was a piece of paper she had been avoiding since the cold room.

The Sorbo case's close-out was due in eleven days. The forfeiture was vacated, the case was remanded, and all she had to do was hand back a clean file. Clean meant she had to sit down and check the chain of custody line by line, including the parts nobody ever looked at, because the one thing she had learned about this city in three years was that the parts nobody looked at were where the work got done.

The F case—the money case—sat on the left side of her desk. Two shell companies, three properties, one casino floor, and eleven years of transfers that had been signed off on by a single signature: a name that appeared in no city directory, no corporate registry, and no tax roll.

She had first seen that signature on Tuesday, in a torn ledger stub, in a cold room.

Now she typed it into the F file.

**One match.**

Signed, countersigned, and notarized, on a property transfer, four years ago, in a building she had walked through twice.

She sat back and looked at it for a while.

One dead man signing a freeze order. One nonexistent man signing property transfers. Same city, same decade, same paperwork, and nobody in eleven years had ever asked either of them for an ID.

*Evidence doesn't point. Somebody points it.*

She printed the match, folded it twice, and put it in the inside pocket of her bag, where she kept things she did not intend to hand in.

---

The Fourth Precinct smelled like floor wax and burnt coffee, and the property room was in the basement, past a door that needed two people to open it.

The man at the door was already waiting for her, and he was not in uniform. Coat, tie, shoes polished too well for this building.

"Detective Mercer," he said, without offering a hand. "You're the lawyer on the Sorbo file."

"I'm the lawyer on the Sorbo file."

"Then you get ten minutes and you sign the sheet." He held the door. "Nobody in, nobody out, and nothing leaves."

She looked at him for one second longer than she needed to. He looked back without any particular interest in her, which told her something: he had not been told to watch her. He had been told to watch the room.

Doyle was inside, in a lab coat over a sweater, with a stainless table and four evidence bags laid out like place settings.

The phone was in the third one.

"You opened it," she said.

"I turned it on. That's all." Doyle pulled on a glove and picked up the bag. "Found on the body. Screen's cracked, battery's fine."

"Log says it came in at two this morning."

"Uh-huh."

"Has anybody else opened this bag?"

Doyle looked up. "Why."

"Just answer."

He thought about it. "No," he said. "Nobody but me."

She didn't say anything, and something in her face made him look at the bag again, and then he stopped looking at it, and put it down on the table.

"Twelve minutes," Mercer said from the doorway. "You've got ten."

---

The phone's last call had been dialed at 5:43 in the afternoon, nine days ago.

She read it four times, because the first three times all she could see was where it went.

**Moretti Holdings, extension 4417.**

She knew that number. She had called it in April, twice, about the Sorbo engagement.

Doyle was watching her. "That's the part everyone's going to like," he said. "Line usually doesn't get this clean."

"It doesn't."

"No."

She put the bag down and moved to the front of the table, where the preliminary had been clipped to the outside of the folder, the way they did it before the pathologist finished.

Time of death, preliminary, pending toxicology: between 4:20 and 5:10 p.m.

And the last check-in with a cell tower: 5:03 p.m., Harbor Ring, 11 Eastport Road.

And the last call dialed: 5:43 p.m.

She stood very still for a second and a half, and then she felt the thing she had learned to wait for in a courtroom: the small, cold click of a mechanism closing.

**The man had been dead for at least half an hour when his phone made a call.**

Not forty minutes of a dead man's thumb on a screen. Somebody standing in a cold room, holding a dead man's phone, choosing a number that would take an afternoon's work and turn it into a headline.

She turned the bag over in her hands. "Who did the tower request?"

"Feds," Doyle said. "Yesterday."

"And the death window?"

"Medical examiner's, this morning."

"So yesterday, somebody had the tower data and no time of death." She set the bag down on its square. "And today the window shows up and it happens to sit an hour before the call."

Doyle said nothing. He had worked in this room for nineteen years; he knew exactly how loud he was allowed to be.

She looked at the list of the phone's last seventeen calls.

Fifteen of them were to people whose names she could guess at: two suppliers, a lawyer, a woman in the Old Town who got called twice a week, a man at a shipping office.

The sixteenth was Moretti Holdings.

The seventeenth—the most recent—was incoming, and it came in at 11:58 that same night.

**Incoming, tagged with a number that had been disconnected for two years.**

She reached for the pen in her bag, and then stopped, and looked at the evidence bag again, at the seal along the top.

Two layers of tape.

The bottom layer was the lab's: white, printed with the case number, cut clean. The top layer was clear, and it had been laid down over the white one, a little off-square, the way people do it when they are not being careful and are in a hurry.

She looked at that off-square strip of tape for a long time.

Someone had opened this bag before her.

---

"Sign here."

Mercer put the sheet in front of her at the door, next to the property room's steel counter, in a hallway with a camera in the corner.

The sheet was a property disposition form: item, description, status.

Somebody in the typing pool had already filled in the first two lines.

**Item 41. One cellular telephone. Manufacturer Nokia. Screen cracked.**

The third line—status—was blank.

The categories were printed down the side of the page in small letters, and there were six of them: evidence, contraband, unassociated property, biological, firearms, other.

She thought about it for three seconds.

Then she wrote **unassociated property** on the line, signed her name underneath, dated it, and handed the pen back.

Mercer took the sheet, looked at the third line, and didn't react to it, which meant nothing at all; people in his line of work didn't react to anything until they were asked.

"Nine days is a long time to leave a phone in a box," she said.

"Talk to the county." He turned the sheet face down on the counter and put a paperweight on it. "It's been a busy season."

She walked out through the basement, up the stairs, past the floor wax and the burnt coffee, out into a grey morning with the rain holding off, and across the parking lot to her car.

She got in, and didn't start it.

She had a report to send to Howard before noon and she knew what it was going to say—three lines, no attachments, nothing collected, nothing to hand over—and she knew it was the first time in three years that the report would be a lie.

Not a big lie. Not a false statement. Just a piece of paper with one object missing from it, and one object is a whole different case.

She put her hand under her left collarbone.

One.

Two.

Three.

She stopped before seven, which she almost never did, and started the car.

Behind her, on the third floor of the Fourth Precinct, a light came on in the property room.

She didn't turn around to see it. She was already three blocks away when she thought about the man with the shoes.